Dirt

by Bill Buford

  I stopped for lunch in the town of Beaune, the heartland of Burgundy, and continued. At Dijon, the highway bends northwest, in the direction of Paris.

  My destination was Amboise, once the home of François Premier, the king of France from 1515 to 1547 (and the father-in-law of Catherine de’ Medici). The town is on the Loire River and along a famous fifty-mile stretch of castles. These are the Valley’s architectural miracles—Chambord, a twenty-eight-year building project begun by François Premier that appears to have been designed by two Tuscans; Chenonceau, reconstructed in 1515 and, from 1560, the home of Catherine de’ Medici; Châteaudun—one ornately elaborate château after another, more than fifty of them. The turreted castle that Disney uses in its fireworks-exploding logo could have been modeled on the châteaux of the Loire: Even in the sixteenth century, this stretch was like a fairy tale, the châteaux having been built not as fortifications but, in effect, as dream statements, inspired by northern Italy’s noble residences, many designed by northern Italy’s architects or decorated with Italian fireplaces, staircases, and tapestries. In the same spirit—and it amounts to a French longing for what the Italians had already achieved, a Renaissance of their own—François Premier, an Italian speaker, shortly after having been made king, invited Leonardo da Vinci to move to Amboise, then the royal home. It wasn’t without precedent. The king sought out Italian artists to patronize—like Benvenuto Cellini and Andrea del Sarto—and they were welcome at his table. But Leonardo? It was an astonishing gesture.

  More astonishing, Leonardo accepted.

  The following year, at the age of sixty-four, he embarked on the journey to his new home, probably crossing the Alps from Italy (there is no record of how he traveled), bearing modest belongings on his pack animals, including two just-completed paintings. He was installed, grandly, in the Château du Clos Lucé, a vast “enclosed” property that included lawns, streams, and woods. It was a short walk from the king’s residence, so that the two men might have meals and conversation together, which they did almost daily.

  I had been to Vinci, where Leonardo comes from—da Vinci—in Tuscany. Leonardo is the undisputed genius of the Florentine Renaissance. Just about everyone knows this. What I hadn’t known, even when I was visiting the village where he grew up, was that he would die, in 1519, effectively a Frenchman. The detail is seldom mentioned in Italy. It seems to be mentioned less in France, even though Leonardo’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is hanging in the Louvre because it was one of the canvases he brought with him. The other was Saint John the Baptist.

  Just past Chablis, there is a junction—Paris to the north, the Loire to the west—and I joined a long arching highway that crosses the middle of France, traversing the plateau of la Beauce. You never see it, unless you have to drive through it, and I, in my effort to discover why a king would have persuaded an aging Leonardo to move to France, was now in the middle of it.

  I hadn’t anticipated the flatness or its size, four thousand square miles, a vast alluvial plain, formed by the ancient sediments of two rivers, the Seine in the north and the Loire in the south.

  The harvest had been completed, and the soil tilled. From one horizon to the other, there were uniform rows of turned earth, an exacting symmetry. It was hot. It was soporific. I put on the radio. I turned up the volume. I drove fast, no vehicles in front, an empty highway. There was nothing to look at, no habitation, no leaf, only the sky, brutal blue, and the endlessness of plowed fields, their unmitigating brownness. I spotted an owl on a fence post.

  La Beauce is called “le grenier de la France”: its granary, its breadbasket. This is where the nation’s flour comes from. Every year, the wheat, once harvested, is threshed and milled, becoming, with each day, month, year of its indifferent storage, less and less a food and more a neutral, characterless starch. The plant is ripped out and replanted, refertilized, nitrogens added to stimulate growth, redusted with pesticides, regrown in what is basically a fake soil. When Bob talked of la farine, he was not thinking of one milled from the wheat grown here.

  Bob’s flour came from the Ardèche. In fact, he bought a lot of flours, but a farm in the Ardèche was his main source. The Ardèche is south and slightly west of Lyon and is rarely mentioned without an epithet invoking its otherness. It is “sauvage”—wild—with cliffs and forests and boar. It is untamed. Its mountains are formed by volcanoes, like so many chimneys, still cup-shaped, still menacing, though dormant.

  I hadn’t visited Bob’s Ardèche source, but, once, on an August Sunday morning, I drove through a valley nearby, with Daniel Boulud. We were on our way to the far verge of the region, to meet with Michel Bras. Bras is an eccentrically original chef with a restaurant on an eccentrically unspoiled hilltop. To get there, we had to contend with a chain of volcanic domes. Either you went over them or you drove for hours to get around them. We went over them, and each village we then encountered seemed to take us farther from modern France.

  In Félines (a river, a waterfall, a church—altitude, 3,000 feet; population, 1,612), we bought charcuterie at a boucherie. The village had two. Few places celebrated the pig more than the Ardèche, Daniel explained.

  At La Chaise–Dieu, we bought more charcuterie (it was different—fattier, more coarsely prepared, more rustic). When we got back into the car, we were blocked by several hundred residents on a march. We waited; there was only one route through town. At the top of a mountain there are no side streets. The crowd was on its way to church. Where else does a whole town go to church together?

  In Saint-Didier-sur-Doulon, our passage was blocked. The mass there had just finished.

  We crossed a pass, and the land flattened. The route was again blocked: by goats.

  In Bob’s boulangerie, there was a picture of a goat on a steep Ardèche hill. It was kept by Bob’s farmer friend, the one who grew the wheat that was then milled locally into a flour that Bob used to make his bread. The picture was the only information Bob’s customers needed. Who needs a label when you have a goat?

  What made that wheat so special?

  “Oh, I don’t know. The dirt, maybe?”

  “The dirt?”

  “The Ardèche is volcanic! No dirt is better than volcanic soil. It is the iron heart of France.”

  * * *

  —

  ONCE, I ASKED VIANNAY HOW HE WOULD DESCRIBE HIS FOOD. It was a journalist question. But by Viannay’s reaction—he seemed to freeze and was momentarily unable to answer—I saw that my role wasn’t entirely clear. I wasn’t really here as a writer, not at this point, but as Viannay’s stagiaire and cook.

  “Néoclassique,” he then said, emphatically. “My cooking is néoclassique.”

  Neoclassical? I repeated the word silently. Who today uses such a term?

  Viannay seemed pleased with the effect.

  “I am a neoclassicist,” he added as though for clarification, and turned and went upstairs to his office.

  I got back to work, thinking: Yes, there would be a classic period in French cooking—probably several. Is that what Viannay was doing, neo-versions of them?

  On another occasion, we were having a coffee at the bar after le personnel and I asked where he was from.

  “Near Paris,” he said, “Versailles. But”—he added quickly, appearing to recognize the implications of my question—“my grandfather was Lyonnais.” In Lyon, there is an assumption that only a Lyonnais knows how to cook Lyonnais.

  I made him nervous. I was asking him basic journo questions because he made me nervous, and I felt uncomfortable (with him, my French, my role, whatever it was) making chitchat.

  “I knew two New Yorker journalists,” he said suddenly, seeming to recognize my unease. “Neil Sheehan and Susan Sheehan.”

  “They are both Pulitzer Prize winners,” I said. Both had filed pieces when I was an editor at The New Yorker. “They are famous.”

 
“They were the parents of Catherine, my girlfriend. I remember hearing their typing upstairs. They were always writing.” He paused, seeming to recall clickety-clack sounds.

  “You had an American girlfriend?”

  “Not just a ‘girlfriend.’ More serious than ‘girlfriend.’ ”

  “And you lived in the United States?” I couldn’t help myself: I knew so little about this man, the journo questions kept popping out.

  “We were intending to live there, Catherine and I,” he said, and then, like last time, seeming to convey that he had said too much, he bolted upstairs.

  Viannay wasn’t easy to be with, in any role: so guarded and then seeming to let the guard down and then rushing to put it back up again. I was intrigued by his speech, in its pauses and unexpected stresses. Viannay had a stutter, I now realized, one that he had almost entirely mastered—it was really an almost-stutter—and it gave him a complexity that I hadn’t appreciated, and a vulnerability as well. He gave so little away, he seemed to try so hard to hide his interiority, that when it broke through it was impossible not to be engaged by it.

  Viannay would eventually tell me the story of Catherine, four years later, over a glass of wine. (Spoiler alert number four: Viannay would become a friend—or, rather, I believe he became one; it won’t be surprising if I admit that, with Viannay, I was never quite sure.)

  His basic bio is blah-blah-blah aspirational chef familiar: In 1987, his formation (cooking school, stages at two-star restaurants); in 1998, first job as chef (Les Oliviers, the place Bob delivered bread to); in 2001, first restaurant as patron and chef (M); the MOF in 2004; first Michelin star in 2005; la Mère Brazier in 2008; that second Michelin star in 2009: boom, boom, boom, boom. But there was a gap, when Viannay abandoned his aspirational chef role and left France to be with his girlfriend in the United States, during which his career became so derailed that it would take him ten years to get back on track (an absolute cliché of a metaphor, but one that would turn out to be absolutely apposite). The derailment wasn’t in the love element. It was in his becoming a sandwich maker. To be fair, he also made croissants. What he didn’t make were neoclassic plates of anything.

  To get to America, where Catherine was about to start Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Viannay came up with a loony lark of a scheme that involved his betraying his trusting, impeccably just, and loving father (a professor of physics at the University of Angers), borrowing a large sum (around $35,000 in today’s money), and spending it all in two months. “He pretended to go to Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island, an ‘American cooking institution.’ He even got a friend to join,” Sheehan told me, when I reached her in Washington, D.C., where she now works for the FBI. “Mathieu never went to class. He got kicked out.”

  How did you spend the money? I asked him.

  “Drink,” he said.

  Disgraced, he set out to pay back his father by making sandwiches.

  His first venue: C’est Si Bonne, a lunchtime bistro, in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Second venue: C’est Si Bonne in Chicago. Such was Viannay’s gift, the owners asked him to open a branch there.

  Then he was summoned to do his French military service. But even this was curious (one might say, a little “off the rails”). The careers of many chefs—Michel Richard, Jacques Pépin, Éric Ripert, and even Escoffier—began in army kitchens. Viannay volunteered not for the army, but the air force, and not as a chef, but a sniper and a parachutist, stationed in the mountains of the Languedoc. Had he forgotten his calling? (“Mathieu didn’t have to sign up for that,” Sheehan said, still bitter about Viannay’s Boys’ Own fantasy indulgence. “Uzès was the nearest town! Uzès! Do you know how hard it is to commute to Uzès from the United States?”)

  Afterward, Viannay went back to sandwiches, in Paris now, at the Gare du Nord. “When I was a child,” he explained, “I dreamed about being the chef de gare, the stationmaster who runs the trains. I got a job as chef de la gard. When I told people, they were always impressed, and I had to say, no, what I do has nothing to do with trains. I make the sandwiches served at the station.” He was at the Gare du Nord for two years.

  His next venue? Gare de Lyon-Part-Dieu. There he made sandwiches for four years. But he was, at last, in the gastronomic capital. (Viannay is obviously very good at making sandwiches.)

  THE POPE

  The Dombes has changed a little. But it is still in the key that I love. Wetland skies, with soft, changing colors. Charms, birch trees. Swamps fringed with weeds and, sitting on top, water birds and multicolored ducks floating like toys. Up high, seagulls, white in the sun, gray at dusk. Nothing sumptuous. Nothing flashy. Good French countryside, made to be lived in every day and contemplated in autumn, when the woods take on all the colors of the feathers and fur of the game animals, and the evening fog, rising from the swamps and flooding the distance, takes on a painterly melancholy.

  CROQUE-EN-BOUCHE BY FANNY DESCHAMPS (1976), TRANSLATED BY JESSICA GREEN

  One day, just after le personnel, I was having a coffee at the bar and venting, expressing my frustration that I hadn’t met Paul Bocuse to Stéphane Porto, the tall, immaculately dressed maître d’. I hadn’t shaken Bocuse’s hand. I hadn’t exchanged a word. I couldn’t get to him.

  There were photographs of Bocuse on the walls, from when he worked in the Mère Brazier kitchen.

  I had been told I could reach him through his people. A wife, a daughter, a son-in-law. I wrote them all. The daughter was outright disdainful. The tone was: How dare you think that you, lowly writer guy, would have anything to say to Monsieur Bocuse that was even remotely worth his time?

  Viannay was standing behind me.

  “You want to meet Bocuse?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Come in early tomorrow. Seven. Be on time. I will introduce you. Don’t be late.”

  * * *

  —

  Viannay drove me across the Rhône River and into the third arrondissement to the indoor food market, Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse. I spotted the great chef’s vehicle, a massive black Jeep Wrangler (American), with all the doodads: spotlights on the roof, a winch, and wide off-road tires (Michelin). It was parked on a sidewalk, in front of the hall entrance. The sight confirmed two Lyonnais rumors: (1) Bocuse did indeed have a daily morning coffee at Les Halles, and (2) the police knew his vehicle and never ticketed it.

  For our part, we used a conventional parking lot, and paid for it, entered the hall, and stopped at a vendor, Chez Léon, which has been selling shellfish at Les Halles, or one of its earlier incarnations, since 1920. We had a platter of oysters and a glass of Muscadet, a bracing breakfast. Viannay leaned over and whispered: “Chez Léon. Remember the name; it is where you will buy your oysters. Do you understand?”

  We made our way to Le Boulanger, an informal café opposite the stand of La Mère Richard, the city’s famous cheese lady, where Viannay paused to point out the quality of what was on display. (“This is where you buy your cheese. D’accord?”)

  I looked across the aisle. There he was: Paul Bocuse, sitting by himself, finishing a coffee.

  He was slumped slightly in his chair, and wearing a black Pringle Polo cotton shirt, a worker’s cotton jacket, black trousers, and sneakers, and looked like a regional train conductor at the end of his shift. On spotting us, he stood up. He had shrunk considerably since I’d seen him last. Then again, that last time he had been in a towering toque and heavy-heeled clogs, and doing that erect-chef posture routine. Without the gear, he was, frankly, a little naked. He seemed, to me at least—and it is startling for me even to utter the thought—to be almost normal. He was a man.

  Except he wasn’t, in fact. He was, in fact, a deity.

  There was a lot about him that I didn’t know, I realized instantly. Actually, on reflection, I knew nothing. Or at least now—me, alone with the deity
himself, without a handler—I felt that I knew nothing. I hadn’t yet eaten at his three-star place, and was now angry with myself that I hadn’t taken myself there.

  And here he was, shaking my hand, the Paul Bocuse, and, damn it, startled to find myself in this situation—among the greatest meetings in my life—I went irrevocably shy. Me, the gabby-gabby talker, the intrepid give-it-a-shot guy: I went mute.

  I spent twenty minutes in Bocuse’s company. I said nothing more than merci (or its variations).

  He told me to follow. “Viens,” he said gently.

  “Merci, Chef.”

  He wanted to give me a tour.

  “Viens,” he repeated.

  “Merci, Chef.”

  Since Bocuse knew everyone at Les Halles, and since everyone obviously knew him, and since it was an early hour and few shoppers had shown up yet, and since the place had been named after him, our slow passage through its aisles was surprisingly intimate. It was like being given a tour of his home.

  “Here the charcuterie is very good,” he said, not unlike the owner of a large estate showing off his roses. “This is Chez Sibilia.” Sibilia was an imposing no-nonsense woman with ten employees, all women, all looking like no-nonsense mini-versions of their patroness.

  Viannay whispered: “You will buy your charcuterie nowhere else. D’accord?”

  “Oui, Chef.”

  Sibilia and Bocuse did kiss-kissy bonjours and produced slices of rosette for me to taste, the dried local sausage that Lyonnais crave whenever they leave town. They both stood there studying my mouth, waiting for a verdict, as if such a tasting were a matter of great importance. It was a shtick, of course, their PR routine. I knew that. They knew that I knew that. He’d done it many times; he had done it with her many times. But, meanwhile, the overwhelming fact was this: Bocuse, the Paul Bocuse, was hand-feeding me a saucisson, and I was remarkably okay with that.